


As Jörmungandr Turns

by Elfpen



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Modern Era, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:12:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4357526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfpen/pseuds/Elfpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over a thousand years have passed since Hiccup and Toothless lived, and Berk has long forgotten them. But some parts of this world's history are not meant to stay buried forever. In 2015, A half-viking girl and a ridiculed Berk pedigree are thrust into the adventure of rediscovering Berk's wild, fantastic past. Hybrid universe of Bookverse/Movieverse. Set in the modern day. Mostly OCs, with heavy nods to fandom characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is an idea that's been in my head for a while, and I actually wrote for a bit over on tumblr. I told myself I wasn't going to write it because I have too many works in progress as it is, but inspiration hit and I said "what the heck". I know OCs don't always catch on, but I hope you enjoy this post-canon httyd project of mine.

When faced with catastrophe, defeat or woe, men and women across all time have found a way to pick themselves up carry on. “Life goes on,” the bards say, as does every widow and peasant and king. _Life goes on_ , tick-tocks the unstoppable pendulum of time. Whittled away by war and halved by plague, life goes on and on and on. This sentiment is either hopeful or depressing depending on which end of the plague you are currently standing, but the unchanging nature of its absoluteness has given humankind comfort in times of strife for as long as strife has existed.

But some people have no need of such comfort. In eras of peace, a people’s ability to even understand the word ‘strife’ is watered down by errant thoughts of cozy fires, beachside strolls and foaming mead had with good friends. The ancient chant of life’s unstoppable march dies in their heads, replaced by other thoughts, none so concrete or desperate as those forgotten. This is not entirely their fault. However, when strife inevitably revisits them and evaporates the water from their diluted memories, there is no telling what it will uncover there. 

So it was on the isle of Berk.

As far as modern civilizations go, Berk was modern by minimal standards and only civilized by a split decision made some years ago. Regardless, Berkians were extremely proud of their small spit of land, woven together by bridges and held up by barnacle-encrusted pylons. In the minds of the inferior outsiders who had somehow inherited the majority of the earth’s landscape, Berk was a soggy backwater clumped in with a confederacy of islands known as the Barric Archipelago. But within the rivalry-based clique of the Archipelago itself, Berkians fiercely differentiated themselves from their smaller neighbors by measure of achievement. For instance, any Berkian worth their salt could have told you that Berk was home to the largest library in the region, and had the highest rate of missing teeth per capita. (A survey of the island would find that these two bragging points were mentioned equally as often, but never together.) In fact, before the Archipelago had earned its seat on the United Nations Secretary Council (in the corner, on the back row with an invisible dunce hat attached by silent vote) Berk had been he seat of power in the Archipelago. The other islands happily forgot about this. Berk talked loudly about it whenever it was convenient. Also when it wasn’t. Sometimes both consecutively.

But even with all its bickersome neighbors and nonexistence on the global stage, Berk was an essentially happy, peaceful place. The fishermen loved to fish and the bakers loved to bake; even the younger generation who longed for the great wide world smiled on the weekends, truly, deeply satisfied with their freedom to knock out each others’ teeth and roast marshmallows on the beach afterward. There was a college, and a doctor, the library (of course) and an adorable market on town square. There were big homes and small homes and row homes and one home that existed entirely underground. Life on Berk embodied a balance point between interesting and stability that kept families here for generations.

Although there was a general knowledge that old blood hung around their cliffy home, most Berkians had no idea who belonged to the oldest families on Berk. The only reason you needed to worry about that, they would say, is if you’d accidentally  fallen in love with your cousin – there were laws against that. Other than that, it didn’t much matter. You were on Berk, you were missing two of your teeth, your hair had seasalt in it no matter how you scrubbed, and you could hold your liquor for a bet. That made you family enough.

There were some who remembered, of course. However, more often than not the only way to ensure that your family is remembered for over a millennium is to have done something so worthy of ridicule that it haunts your entire progeny until the end of days. As it so happened, there was only one person left on Berk suffering such a fate, but he spent most of his days holed away from the rest of society - not to hide, not really, but in accordance with a long family tradition of being the local eccentric.

But more on the eccentric later. More pressing to our tale is the fact that in the past few decades, a remarkable number of new families (read as: three new families) had moved to Berk, bringing fresh blood and outsider’s ideas with them. There was bachelorette reporter, who’d fallen in love with Berk after doing a story on their one and only athlete sent to the 2010 Winter Olympics. There was the elderly British couple who, for some unknowable reason, decided it would be nice to retire to an island even soggier and rainier than their own.

Finally, there was the family of Jon Mikkelson, former Barric Ambassador to the country of France. Jon was actually a native of Berk. He’d grown up here, tall thin like a weed, gone to school in the stone schoolhouse that still stood behind town square, eaten the local fish and helped his mother make mead bread on Sundays. He’d also been the first Berkian in thirty years to attempt to learn French, and the first Berkian in a hundred years to succeed at doing so. He was appointed as Ambassador with no competition in the running, and the Barric cabinet really ought to have appreciated their luck while it lasted. He moved to Paris for work and stayed there for love, married a fine young chef and raised two children with her. But as grey hairs snuck in unnoticed among ash blond and his children grew older, Jon felt tired. He wanted to go home. So, after taking a year or so to put their things in order, Jon and his family moved to Berk. His wife was nervous, but happy for a change of scenery, and his son (who’d been to Berk enough to like it, barnacles and all) was excited. But his daughter Jora had never been to Berk, and didn’t particularly like what she’d heard about its bash-em-smash-em culture. But her father assured her there would be endless beaches, caves, mountains, and forests to explore, so she made herself be excited.

She was excited, she told herself. She _was_. She was excited to have a bedroom with a rotted floorboard that looked fit to give in, she was excited to have the whole population stare at her as though she were a fish walking about on shore, she was excited to have a rusty bicycle instead of a metro station beside her house. She was excited.

Force of will never seemed to work for Jora, so she cried sometimes. Her mother comforted her, and told her it would get better. It did, slowly. Even though Jora looked like her mother and her dark hair and eyes put her in a minority among Berk’s extremely Nordic demographic, there was a part of her that whispered _Berk._ Her father belonged here, so she belonged here. Or at least she told herself that when she needed confidence, forcing her chin up higher as she made her way across the tiny grocery mart and a roomful of curious looks. And if she belonged to this island, then the island belonged to her – and she was going to explore every inch of it. She took full advantage of school being out of session and spent her days in the woods, and the cliffs, and the maze-like town.

Of all the places she explored, the beaches were her favorite. She possessed foggy childhood memories of her grandparent’s coastal home in the south of France, but felt the sand beneath her toes now as if it was entirely new. Northern air was sharper and saltier than that of French coasts, but she didn’t mind. She found various knick-knacks on her beach walks, and kept them on her windowsill: a shell, a heart-shaped scrap of kelp, a bottlecap with a Norwegian beer brand name on it, and a piece of oddly shaped metal she could not identify, but wanted to investigate. She went treasure hunting on the beach almost every day to let the sound of crashing waves clear her head. She had never found anything worth particular mention.

But today, that would change. Though she did not know it, today, Jora’s treasure hunt would change not only her life, but the life of Berk, of the Archipelago, and the entire history of the oldest family on Berk. 

As Jora and her family slept, the ocean dredged up an ancient prize and juggled it in unusual currents to Berk’s shores. The waves drove it into the warm, wet sand like a sword into a stone. The waves watched. They waited. The people of Berk had forgotten long ago, but the sea was awakening, pulsating with the Long Forgotten Memory. Life goes on.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

A recurrent theme in Berkian architecture is the recycling of old and sometimes ancient spaces for modern use. Whereas most of their European neighbors had the luxury of national heritage sites and castles kept in tourist-attracting vintage condition, Berk had neither the room or the tax rates to support historical preservation. For this reason, if you wanted to see the remaining history of Berk, you may have found yourself looking in some unusual and not necessarily well-preserved places.

You could hike up Raven’s Peak to see where old Viking statues lay half-crumbled on Raven’s Peak with sharpie mustaches and a “R + L” hearts drawn on their faces.  On the fields of the west bank, there was a yet undiscovered burial mound of a long forgotten king that was only shallowly disturbed by old Mrs. Finnelly when she buried her three-legged dog there. The Purple Squid pub itself dated to the early 1700s, when an intrepid beer connoisseur built into the southern cliffs of Raven’s Peak, and the back wall of the gentleman’s loo was the mountain wall itself. Visitors of the male sex or a convincing disguise could see ancient Norse carvings there depicting creatures unknown. (An impressive sight, but it must be admitted that most individuals who behold it are too inebriated or otherwise occupied to fully appreciate its historic significance.) However, even people who’d only seen pictures of Berk could’ve told you that the most prominent recycled antiquary of Berk was their library, which was built inside the hollow stone base of Raven’s Peak at the center of town.

The oldest annuls of Berk’s history reported that the library used to be a huge community hall, hewn by the Vikings who’d first set foot here (an occasion said to be brought about by ‘pure accident,’ which is the most commonly cause cited for Berk’s progression through history, having surpassed the count of recorded ‘alcohol’ citations in 1982 with the discovery of the Fishbone Bay manuscripts.) Back in those early days, it had operated as a fortified keep and all-purpose meeting place for the village residents. After Christendom swept through the region and convinced the local kings (with gold and swords) that Viking raids were so last century and deeply unnecessary, the need for fortifications nearly vanished. The space was converted to a seven-story building in the seventeenth century, and the original builders had saved on money by using the roughly carved cave wall as the interior walls of the library. It offered interesting atmosphere but mostly made the study rooms feel akin to a dungeon. 

From the outside, the library looked like an entirely ordinary mountain, save for a twenty foot long, sixty foot tall wall of diamond muntin windows and ad thick, wooden double doors at the bottom. It was an unusual sight, and unidentifiable to the uninformed. No one had ever thought to put a sign out front, because if you’d been on Berk long enough to want a library and couldn’t spot it a mile off, you were the daft one.

In the present day, the Berk Public Library is to the Barric Archipelago what the Library of Congress is to the United States – only much smaller, darker, and damper despite the librarian’s obsessive purchase of dehumidifiers. The dark and damp could be accounted for by the fact that the interior of a mountain will almost certainly be, as a general rule, dark and damp. As mentioned, however, a small army of dehumidifiers fought against the onslaught of moisture like paper-protecting sentinels.

In comparison to its population, the size of Berk’s book collection was rather excessive. Even with computer labs, print shops, a postal station and very small and seldom visited museum to fill its rooms, the seven stories of the library were predominantly occupied by shelves and shelves and shelves of books.  The librarian did his best to arrange these shelves in an orderly way, but given the unusual dimensions of the cave and its sloping, uneven walls, the library was very labyrinthian in its layout. The clientele of the library was mostly the Berk College students, and even they were more prone to sleep in the library than they were to read in it. People from other parts of the archipelago often visited Berk for the sole purpose of visiting the library due to its larger collection. However, most days, the library was empty save for a dozen or so patrons perusing the more popular sections.

As has been hinted, the Berk Public Library was overseen by a single librarian. He has been previously referred to as “The Eccentric”, a title he inherited from his father, just as his father inherited it from his mother, and she from her father, and back through the generations. His family who cared about actual names would have called him Stefan, but most people called him Sturlað, or Sturl, or perhaps Sturlað Stefan if they knew him well. It should be explained that “Sturlað”, when translated into English from the heavily-accented and only slightly butchered form of Icelandic used by the Barric Archipelago, literally means “unhinged”. The shortened “Sturl” conveniently also means “crazy”.  Stefan had wondered for years whether or not his father and mother hated him enough to plan the alliteration opportunities when they’d named him. No matter if they had or hadn’t, he’d begun answering to the name by the age of fourteen, which he still hated himself for.

Still, he only had to answer to it occasionally. He had few friends and kept mostly to himself; he was the last of his family still living on Berk. His father had died years ago and his mother was retired in Belgium. His only sibling, an older brother, had moved to Sweden to make a name for himself in business, leaving Stefan alone on Berk. He didn’t mind. He loved working at the library. He had no college degree and no certification to be a librarian aside from being the most experienced employee of the library when the ninety-seven year old librarian died in 2008. No one else applied for the position, and the city council gave him a raise. He didn’t object. Stefan was good with books and catalogs, and had a mission of keeping not just the literacy, but also the history of the island alive.

This, among other reasons, was what kept him away from the world most days, down in the basement of the library that didn’t technically exist in the blueprints found in the archives just two floors above. Stefan had spent eight of his twenty-seven years of life converting the caves below the library into a fully functioning (if dimly lit) archive of Berk’s mysteries and histories, and an obsessive collection of his pet project.

But that is something that will make itself clear as we continue with our story. To begin the tale, we must go back to two days before Jora’s teasure hunt on the beach to the moment when our heroine met the Eccentric for the first time. The interaction went something like this:

“Can I help you?” Stefan asked without looking. The words were a natural reaction to sensing the presence of another soul lingering in the room for more than fifteen seconds.

“Um, I’m not…” an awkward pause. “Certain.” He looked up because of the halted speech and accent. A young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, stood in front of him with her brow drawn in deep concentration. “I come here looking for a dictionary…?” She gave him a hesitant look, unsure if she’d spoken correctly.

“Icelandic, I assume, to…?” He directed the question to her.

“Français?”

“Aha. You are the ambassador’s daughter?”

She looked uncomfortable. “Yes.” She’d probably had to deal with that every time she met someone, he realized. He felt bad.

“I’m sorry, that was rude. I’m Stefan, though no one calls me that. Your name is...”

“Jora,” It took her a moment to process what he’d said. “And if not your name, what do they call you?”

“They call me Sturlað.”

“What does that mean?”

Stefan laughed. “I’ll let you look it up in your dictionary.” The reference books were not far away, so within a minute or so Stefan was handing a dog-eared paperback to Jora. “As it happens, I studied French when I was younger. I donated my dictionary to the library when I graudated.” Jora’s face lit up, and he hated to disappoint her. _“I était très mauvaise à elle,”_ he said, tongue clunky around the pretty words. She smiled at his atrocious accent. “I can still read French, but the accent kills conversation. Anyway, I made a lot of notes in there, translated some Berkian Icelandic that you won’t hear elsewhere. Hopefully you can read my handwriting. I’m sure you’ll do better here than I’d do in France. _Bonne chance.”_

 _“Merci.”_ As Stefan turned away, Jora’s eyes caught on something and she pointed. “Is that a dragon?” She asked. He turned, and looked at the carvings visible on this floor of the cave.

“Oh, yeah,” Stefan said easily. “I call that one Lars,” Stefan laughed to himself. He looked embarrassed. “Um, they’re… historically significant – to Berk, anyway. You’ll see stuff like that all over the island, if you know where to look.”

“But _dragons?_ ” She looked at him strangely. “Why not… what is name… giant snake?”

“Jörmungandr?” Stefan offered. Jora nodded.

“He is a dragon?”

“No, he is the snake that holds Midgard together and turns the wheel of history - these are different – they fly, breathe fire.” Stefan pointed to the carving and indicated the flames and ribbed wings. Jora frowned deeply, taking a moment to understand him.

“They are myths of Norse as well?”

“No, just of Berk.” Stefan told her. He flicked the corner of her dictionary. “Finish this, and I can give you a few books about them.” He gave her a look and put on his thickest Berkian accent. “Here lass, there be dragons.” She could only barely understand him, but smiled at his face. She thanked him and read some of the dictionary and eventually went home after her mother called her cell to let her know that dinner was going cold. Stefan closed the library and went to his home on the mountain face as he did every night, not thinking much about Jora or her dictionary or of Lars.

He hadn’t meant what he said about dragons, not really. He’d been thinking of old books and cave carvings and fairy tales. He hadn’t mean fire that turned beaches to glass and wings that beat clouds into mist, he hadn’t meant _real dragons._

Jora knew this.

The sea did not.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

It had been a dark and stormy night.   
  
In other parts of the world, this would have been the opening line of dark, gritty novel that gathered dust in school library shelves. On Berk, it was the beginning of a typical Tuesday. On this particular Tuesday, the dark and stormy night had given way to a grey and calm morning, which made the world seem so static and thick that every breath you took tasted a tiny shade more boring than the one before.   
  
However, this particular Tuesday was fated to be far more momentous than most. At exactly 14:11 in the afternoon, Jora would change the history of Berk.   
  
Until then, the day was a series of boring breaths.   


* * *

  
  
**07:00**   
  
Stefan’s alarm went off and he shot up from beneath his blanket like a rocket, pivoted with his knees, fell across his sheets like a feeding humpback whale and hit snooze on his way down.   
  
**07:08**   
  
Stefan’s alarm went off again, but this time the lego robot arm that lived by his bedside table woke up for its daily chore of yanking his phone off its stand by the charging cord. It landed it in the pillow he’d set out for safety. It continued to squawk as Stefan’s long arms swung uselessly of his bed toward the ‘okay’ button.   
  
“Sonofabionicle,” he groaned. He put his feet out of bed first and kicked the lego arm. It fell over.   
  
**07:12**   
  
Now wearing a shirt in addition to his boxers, Stefan righted the lego arm and apologized. It suffered the cycle of abuse in silence.   
  
**07:17**   
  
Stefan pulled a sweater over his head and ignored the multiple pulls in the knit. He glanced at the mirror and sighed. He patted down his hair and ignored the beard that was already growing back. Since puberty, Stefan had been suffering a dual curse: facial hair that grew exceptionally quickly, and facial hair that grew in an entirely different color than that on his head. He liked his brunette hair and eyebrows – thought it gave him a sophisticated, unkempt professor like look. The thick ginger beard just made him look ridiculous. Then again, people called him crazy no matter how long his beard was. He sighed and decided not to shave.   
  
**07:25**   
  
Stefan left his house and walked the well-worn dirt path down to the library, mind concentrating on the coffee machine that awaited him on the third floor break room.   
  
**07:30**   
  
Down the hill on the edge of the village, Jora’s alarm went off, a calm fluttering wind chime recording that had been waking her up for school since she was eleven. She got up on the first chime and dressed quickly and quietly; sweater, rain jacket, jeans, rainboots. She tip-toed past her brother’s room and packed her rucksack with her dictionary, a camera, a thermos of tea, and a cold ham sandwich.   
  
**07:37**   
  
Jora passed her father on her way to the back door. He was drinking coffee as dark as the circles under his eyes.   
  
“You’re on break, why in the world are you awake?” He asked. She came over and stole one of his tea biscuits.   
  
“I’m going exploring,” She said through crumbs and gave him a kiss on the head.   
  
“I’m losing my daughter to the Morning People,” he complained into his cup. She laughed. “Be careful!” he said out of obligation, and she smiled reassuringly at him. The blinds on the back door window swung noisily after she shut the door.   
  
**08:08**   
  
Jora stopped in the woods to drink her tea and watch a puddle of tadpoles. She took a photograph of them and smiled, scrolling back through the photos she’d taken of them over the past weeks. “You guys have grown,” She told them in French, and pulled out her dictionary, flipping through the pages. She sounded out the word ‘tadpole’ in Icelandic for the next several minutes.   
  
**08:22**   
  
She walked through town with her dictionary open, drilling herself on Icelandic words for places and objects as she passed them. She wondered if the Librarian would mind much if she practiced her accent on him when she returned the dictionary. She felt bad because she’d forgotten his name.   
  
**08:50**   
  
Happily, Stefan hadn’t forgotten his own name. The drunken student he was trying to peel out of Study Room #3 had.   
  
“Come on, Thorston, your mom’s left me eighteen messages. At the reference desk. Do you know how loud and annoying that phone’s ringer is? Just go home.”   
  
“Nooooo,” moaned the tattooed, buzz-cut teen on the floor. “No, man, you don’t understaaaand, mom can’t see me like this.”   
  
“You live in her attic, Rey, I think she knows you party too hard. Now get up.” Stefan lifted the dead weight of the lanky teen and draped him over a shelving cart while he complained about someone named Sera. “There we go,” Stefan said, absently throwing Rey’s backpack and phone onto the cart as well. Rey’s face was nose-to sweater with Stefan’s side as the librarian pushed the cart toward the front door. No one looked up as they passed.   
  
“Dude, this is a nice jumper…. Whas this, cashmere?”   
  
“Do I look rich enough for that?” Stefan asked, using Rey’s feet to push open the door.   
  
“Ow.”   
  
“Uh huh.” Stefan dumped Rey outside and the disoriented man squinted up into the sunlight.   
  
“Oh look, mom.” He pointed and waved. “Hi mom!”   
  
Mrs. Thorston was storming up the path with an angry look on her face that Rey couldn’t see yet. Stefan pushed his cart back to the door.   
  
“And that’s me done,” he said, and rushed back inside. He went to the reference desk and deleted all eighteen messages before helping a primary schooler find the mathematics section. Then it was emptying the book drop and scanning and shelving, and replacing the reference books that no one seemed capable of keeping in their correct shelves.   
  
“Which thrilling new words await us today?” he said to no on in particular, changing the page to which giant dictionary lay open on its stand.  “Rotten – Route” and “Router – Rude” looked up at him. He felt disappointed somehow. He looked up and the dragon carving he called Clarisse, who looked dolefully back at him from her one remaining eye. “I suppose it’s worse for you,” he said apologetically. “You can’t even move.” As expected, Clarisse had nothing to say on the matter. Stefan turned away.   
  
He really needed friends.   
  
**09:40**   
  
Jora swung her legs off the edge of the pier and chewed her sandwich. She was listening to youtube recordings of Berkian Icelandic, trying to master their unique pronunciation. It was slow going, but so much better than trying to practice with real people. A phone couldn’t snicker when you spoke with an accidental lisp.   
  
**10:34**   
  
Stefan finished his third cup of coffee. He found dregs at the bottom of his mug that looked vaguely like the planet Saturn. The fact that he noticed this made him find a book on tea leaf reading and discover that apparently, the greater forces of the universe believed him to be a woman who would soon receive life changing news regarding her immanent motherhood. He turned the book over and looked at the author’s biography. Well, at least that is if… Madam Yvaine Agnar was to be believed. He’d write a negative amazon review later. He tossed the book on a cart and looked at his watch, wondering if he could get away with a two-hour lunch break.   
  
**11:12**   
  
Jora stopped at one of the two petrol stations on Berk to buy a bottle of water. She spoke with the clerk in Icelandic without receiving any weird looks. She punched the air in victory after she’d left, and then blushed when the cute boy at pump #2 stared at her for it. She shuffled away and tried not to think about it when she opened her water bottle later.   
  
**12:49**   
  
Stefan was nearly an hour into his two hour lunch break heist and no one seemed to care. He glanced warily up at the security cameras that were probably turned off and felt guilty. He ate his reheated cod with shifty eyes.   
  
**13:30**   
  
An hour and a half into his two hour break, a customer rang the bell at the circulation desk. Stefan jumped at the sound and nearly spilled tea on himself. He recovered and left the break room. Well, it had been worth a shot.   
  
**13:51**   
  
Jora stepped onto her favorite beach, wondering what treasures she would find today.   
  
**14:00**   
  
The grandfather clock in the Berk museum chimed the hour and woke Stefan from the doze he’d fallen into while repairing the spine of  _Sense and Sensibility_ . He sighed and made his eyes refocus.   
  
**14:04**   
  
Jora found an empty beer can and tossed it in her rucksack to recycle later.   
  
**14:08**   
  
Stefan taught a grown man how to pronounce the word ‘façade’.   
  
**14:11**   
  
The day changed.   
  
Jora’s phone buzzed from her pocket. She sighed and apprehensively and looked at the text from her brother.   
  
_godsdammit Jora where did you go now I swear you’re never hom_   
_*home_   
  
Jora put her phone back in her pocket and kept walking.  _Bzzt bzzt_ . She wish she had the will power to ignore it. She didn’t.   
  
_well anyway I made lunch_   
_you know if you need that sort of stuff_   
_for all I know you’ve been eating twigs and berries for the past month_   
_I’ll eat all of your chips if you don’t show_   
  
Jona continued to ignore her brother’s texts, looking up at the lapping shore, dotted with driftwood, branches, silt, and a few odd dead fish carcasses.    
  
_Bzzt bzzt_ .   
  
_you’d better not kill yourself or catch rabies from some dead animal junk washe dup from that store last night_   
_*storm_   
_…I know you’re reading these Jona your receipts are turned on_   
  
Jora rolled her eyes and shoved the phone into her pocket. It continued to buzz every few seconds, probably her brother yelling at her to stop pretending to ignore him and just answer him for gods’ sake, you butthead. She splashed her feet louder in the surf to drown out the notification sounds.   
  
She didn’t see it until she’d slipped on it and nearly fallen over. Shrouded in a cloud of sand under the water, something shone up at her. Even though she was excited to finally find something of note, She was hesitant to touch it. It could’ve been anything. So many weird things washed up from the ocean depths every time there was a storm like the one they’d had last night. It could be a dead animal, or part of one. It could be a poisonous snail or sea urchin (notwithstanding that neither was native to this part of the globe) it could kill her or hurt her, or be so disgusting that she threw up her breakfast into the sea. She picked it up anyway.   
  
It was round - no, not quite round, more oval. It was dark, and had scratches where sand and rock and hit and rubbed it. There was a barnacle on one end, and a film of algae disguised the shinier parts. She wiped it off on the sand. It was the size of a cantaloupe, if cantaloupes could be oblong and smooth. She turned it over and over, rubbing the surface and wondering what sort of rock it was, where it had come from, if it had once been part of a wall or a lost civilization or if nature just liked perfectly shaped oval stones.    
  
She’d been growing increasingly bored with it, enough so that she was beginning to hear her phone buzzing again, when it moved.   
  
She yelped and dropped it, because it really, seriously had moved. She would have sworn it in front of a judge. She stared at it for a long time, mind running wild. Was it a discarded bomb? A weird, living coral? A sea cucumber? No, those were slimy, she knew. She stared at the unmoving thing for several long minutes until she realized how ridiculous she must’ve looked: alone on a beach staring at a rock like it was going to eat her. She shuffled over to it and poked it. Nothing happened. She rolled it down the smooth slope of the beach, and frowned when it lolled to a stop, bobbing as though one side of it weighed more than the rest. She poked it again, and again it rolled, stopping in the same lopsided way as before. She picked it up, and turned it, shaking it, weighing it.   
  
It moved again. She dropped it.   
  
Oh, she  _knew_ it had moved that time. She had felt it. Something inside of that outer shell was slithering, moving. Her heart nearly beat out of her chest when the rock began to twitch. She watched the changing imprints beneath it in the sand to reassure herself she was really seeing this. Tentatively, she reached out and put her palm smooth against the surface of the rock/shell/creature/thing. It moved again, but she managed to keep her hand there, feeling it.   
  
It reminded her of when her cousin had been pregnant and she’d gotten to feel the baby kick. The movement had been muffled, and unseeable, but definitely there, there enough to feel through the mother’s body. This was the same. Except instead of a soft fleshy belly, this was a hard rock. But if she could feel movement through a  _rock_ , what in the world was inside of it?   
  
Suddenly, the rock grew very warm to the touch. Jora jerked her hand away and fell back. She hardly had time to blink before the rock cracked and exploded. A chunk of obsidian shell missed her shoulder by inches. She turned wide eyes back at the rock, which was missing one of its ends and continued to rock back and forth on the sand like an unsteady egg on a countertop.   
  
An egg.   
  
It was an  _egg_ .   
  
Jona ventured forward on sand-covered hands and knees and carefully looked to see what, exactly, she’d dug out of the sea. She flinched when the egg split apart even more, small shards of shell crumbling away like a frozen curtain, an old veil that the stagehands had forgotten to lift for eons.   
  
It was as black as it’s shell, and she had no idea what it was. She heard it take its first breath, and shivers ran down her spine, heart beating fast. She did not know if she was afraid. She didn’t even know if she should’ve been.   
  
From behind the abandoned egg, a round black thing appeared. Two small, green eyes blinked up at her. The thing trilled. Carefully, desperately hoping that she would not scare or traumatize it, she scooted the egg away so she could look at it. A head, two eyes, Four legs, a tail, a few fins? And…Oh dear gods. Those weren’t fins. Those were wings.   
  
The thing opened its mouth and sneezed. Blue flame erupted onto the sand. The little thing looked astonished, and nosed the steaming piece of glass that it’d created, trilling to itself. It looked back up at her.   
  
It was a dragon. A fire-breathing, winged, newborn baby  _dragon._   
It had stumbled up beside her, purring like a cat. It pressed its head into her hand.   
  
For some reason she felt compelled to call it Lars.   


* * *

  
  
Why, why,  _why_ had she thought this was a good idea?   
  
Now back at home, Jora locked herself in her room under the pretense of taking a shower before dinner. She brought her rucksack into the bathroom and turned on the bath so no one would come knocking.   
  
Slowly, she loosened the draw string and rolled the canvas back. Nestled between her camera and her empty thermos there was a small black dragon. Moving slowly, she cupped her hands around the round ball and lifted it from the bag. Its tail drooped off her hands. It looked like a very large salamander with wings. She tried petting it on its head with her finger and it purred lowly, sides vibrating like a cat. Its eyes slid open lazily, cloudy third eyelids blinking a few times before pulling back fully so it could look at her. It made a tiny adorable noise, and she bit her lip.   
  
She was in  _so_ over her head. Scenes from  _Jurassic Park_ played in her mind.   
  
Okay so maybe this wasn’t a dragon. Maybe it was… one of those lizards that walked on water. She’d heard about those. They existed. Maybe not in the Baltic, but they  _existed._ Surely this was something like that. Or maybe the ‘wings’ were fins after all – maybe this was a  sort of… aquatic… lizard. Or something. Like a sea snake, but a lizard. They just  _looked_ like wings because they’d been all cooped up in an egg for so long. Yeah. That made sense.   
  
Lars sneezed again, and left scorches on Jora’s sweater.   
  
Dear gods this  _was_ a dragon.   
  
“I can’t keep you here!” Jora hissed at it. She wanted to, but couldn’t fight against the images of her house in flames. “I don’t even know what the hell you are!”   
  
Someone knocked on her door and she jumped.  _“Jora? Dinner’s ready, honey, you almost done?”_   
  
“Uh, yeah, mum, I’ll be there in a few minutes,” She said over the shower.   
  
“Just stay here, I’ll be back in a few minutes.  _Please_ don’t burn anything.” Jora put the dragon hatchling back in her rucksack with a hand towel to nest into. Quickly, she undressed and dunked her hair into the shower to make it look like she’d bathed. She changed into a different pair of jeans and a hoodie. She gave Lars one last look before closing the door and joining her family for dinner.   
  
“You still exist!” Her brother Aaron said, talking around a mouthful of bread. They still used French around the house because she and Aaron were still learning Icelandic.   
  
“Aaron, do not talk around your food,” their mother reprimanded. He swallowed before continuing.   
  
“Where’ve been all day?”   
  
Jora shrugged. “The forest, the beach. Went to the petrol station for a snack.”   
  
“World traveller,” Her father smiled. “Have fun?”   
  
“Mmhmm,” she said, trying to look causal. “The tadpoles are still there.”   
  
“Oh,” Her mother seemed happy, “I was afraid the storm drowned them out.”   
  
“Nope, they were fine.” Jora shoveled soup into her mouth, eager to get away.   
  
“Slow down, ma bijou,”her mother said, smiling. “This is why you need to eat more at lunch, you’re starving.”   
  
Jora laughed hesitantly. “I’m sorry, mama, I wanted to go to the library tonight before it closes.”   
  
“Leaving again?” Aaron said over his food again.   
  
“Aaron,” their mother warned. He rolled his eyes and swallowed.   
  
“I think she’s ashamed of us,” he said.   
  
“I am not,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get better at my Icelandic so when school starts I don’t embarrass myself.”   
  
“Really?” Her father sounded impressed. “Let’s hear it.” Jora smiled in spite of herself and said slowly in Icelandic:   
  
“Today I went to the forests and saw the tadpole group, and on later went to the beach and I myself saw the waves on the ground – it was very beauti- beaut-… nice.” She smiled. Her mother clapped.   
  
“That was wonderful!” she said, “Look at you.” She gave her daughter a kiss on the head. Her father was nodding with a smile.   
  
“Very good – could use a bit of polishing, but you’re doing better than I did with French when I met your mother.” This made her mother snort. “By the way – be-a-u-ti-ful,” he sounded out the word. She repeated it. They started laughing eventually and she decided to finish her dinner without further attempts. She finished before the others and put away her dishes.   
  
“Merci, mama,” She kissed her mother’s head, “I will be back soon.”   
  
“If you’re gone too long I’m taking your room,” Aaron said. Her father shook his head.   
  
“You may want to hurry, the library closes soon.” He told her, and she smiled. She grabbed her rucksack and hoped her smile didn’t look as fake as it felt as she tried to ignore the squirming dragon at her back.   


* * *

  
  
Jora found a rocky spot in the forest near the tadpole’s pond that had a tiny cave-like niche in the side. She slid the hand towel into it and snuggled Lars inside. He (she?) it was asleep.   
  
“I’ll be back soon, please don’t run off!” She whispered, and paused to add a warm bed of moss to the cave, some of which she soaked in water in case it got thirsty.   
  
Then it was off to the library. She jogged most of the way there to make it on time, so she was out of breath and red in the face when she reached the front door. The Librarian opened the door just as she reached for the handle. She came very close to running into his name badge. “Stefan!” She said, looking at the tag.  _That_ was his name, now she remembered.   
  
Stefan was startled, but gathered himself. “Jora?” He recalled. “The library closes at 20:00, you know.”   
  
“I, uh, ye-yeah,” She looked at her watch. 20:08. Frick. “I, just, uh…”   
  
“If it’s about the dictionary, you don’t have to worry about it – it’s not due for another two weeks.”   
  
“No, no, it’s not that… Lars.” She said. Stefan looked at her as he fished out his keys.   
  
“Sorry?”   
  
“You mentioned that you had books about dragons,” She said, trying to keep her voice nonchalant. “And I… was wondering if I could see them.”   
  
She expected him to turn her away, but he paused with the keys in the lock and gave her a sour look.   
  
“Are you mocking me?”   
  
“What?” She frowned. He sighed shook his head.   
  
“No, sorry, that’s stupid. You’re not from Berk. Umm…” He rubbed his eyes and shrugged, thinking  _why hell not._ “Yeah. Sure. I uh… have a few books.” He opened the library door and turned on the lights. “Why the sudden interest?”   
  
“You, uh…” she wrestled the Icelandic on her tongue. “You talked about the uh… Lars yesterday, and talked about other dragons around Berk. I have been explored the island and I have been seeing many other dragons on the island.” It wasn’t a lie  _as such,_ she told herself. Stefan seemed impressed.   
  
“Oh, okay. Most people don’t go looking for that sort of… stuff…” He sounded surprised. He looked down at the small and incomprehensive mythology shelf. He glanced up at Jora again.   
  
“So… you want to know about the myths or the real stuff?”   
  
“Real stuff?” Jora’s heart was beating out of her chest.   
  
“Yeah, the carvings, the history of Berk, that sort of thing.” Stefan said, crossing his arms and giving her a calculating look.   
  
Jora’s heart rate fell back to normal. “Oh, right. Of course. Um… The real things,” She said.   
  
Stefan nodded, and began walking across the library toward the door with an ‘Employees Only’ sign. “Follow me.”   
  
  
  



End file.
